Cleaning up the SDS Mess - Four Keys to Success

Is Software Defined Storage (SDS) getting hijacked? It seems every vendor, old and new, is claiming that their storage is “software defined”. The original intent was to create software-only solutions that could be deployed on the customer’s choice of servers. But that original intent has evolved, and now hardware vendors are providing what they claim to be software defined storage solutions too. In addition, SDS is being combined with an embedded compute function to create hyper-converged solutions as well.

In this webinar we will discuss the differences in these approaches and you will learn what the four key deliverables of a SDS solution should be so you can decide which makes the most sense for your organization.

Looking for more cost-effective ways to implement fibre channel cabling? Learn why proper cabling is important and how it fits into data center designs. Join this webcast to hear FCIA experts discuss:
- Cable and connector types, cassettes, patch panels and other cabling products
- Variables in Fiber Optic and Copper Cables: Reflectance, Insertion Loss,
Crosstalk, Speed/Length Limitations and more
- Different variations of Structured Cabling in an environment with FC
- Helpful tips when planning and implementing a cabling infrastructure within a SAN

To simplify the development process, microservice development is increasingly being conducted using containers. However, the picture is not always rosy, especially in an enterprise environment where both old and new processes must be managed simultaneously and elegantly in order to avoid chaos.

This session will review the top issues that must be addressed when making this transition--including development, operations, and even the finance department--with a focus on microservice development in hybrid cloud environments.

About the presenter:
Robert Starmer is a cloud advisor and the founder of Kumulus Technologies. At Kumulus, Robert and his team provide infrastructure-focused DevOps, systems reliability engineering, and cloud computing consulting, enabling companies at all levels to optimize their cloud usage. He also uses his more than 20 years of experience in cloud, SRE, and DevOps to educate the industry through articles, presentations, and curriculum development. Robert is a Certified OpenStack Administrator (COA) and a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology.

The use of microservice architectures has exploded over the past couple years, but does that mean they are right for every business? When it comes to building a business case for containers and microservices, how do you determine whether or not this model is the right fit for your organization?

Join this live expert panel moderated by Haidee McMahon, SDDC Technical Solutions Marketing Manager at Intel, for a deeper look and discussion around deriving value from microservices. Whether in a complex data center app or a web or mobile app hosted on cloud infrastructure, what is the underlying architecture behind the scenes? What are the pros and cons from a UX/UI perspective, if any, and how do you make a case for microservices in your enterprise?

One of the enduring truths about simplicity is that scale makes everything hard, and with that comes complexity. And when we’re not processing the data, how do we store it and access it?

The only way to manage large quantities of data is to make it addressable in larger pieces, above the byte level. For that, we’ve designed sets of data management protocols that help us do several things: address large lumps of data by some kind of name or handle, organize it for storage on external storage devices with different characteristics, and provide protocols that allow us to programmatically write and read it.

In this webcast, we'll compare three types of data access: file, block and object storage, and the access methods that support them. Each has its own use cases, and advantages and disadvantages; each provides simple to sophisticated data management; and each makes different demands on storage devices and programming technologies.

Perhaps you’re comfortable with block and file, but are interested in investigating the more recent class of object storage and access. Perhaps you’re happy with your understanding of objects, but would really like to understand files better, and what advantages or disadvantages they have compared to each other. Or perhaps you want to understand how file, block and object are implemented on the underlying storage systems – and how one can be made to look like the other, depending on how the storage is accessed. Join us as we discuss and debate:

Team collaboration apps like Slack, Spark, Glip, and Microsoft Teams are taking the enterprise market by storm. Given the more than 20 apps now on the market, where do IT leaders begin?

In this webinar series, we'll provide insight and guidance based on Nemertes' 2018 Unified Communications and Collaboration Research Study, answering the following questions:

• What is the state of team collaboration adoption?
• What are the drivers and business cases?
• How do customers rate their vendors?
• Will team collaboration replace or augment existing UC apps?
• What are the pros and cons of a single vendor versus multi-vendor approach?
• How do I integrate team collaboration into business apps and workflows?
• How do I address security, governance, and compliance?
• How are vendors differentiating themselves?
• What are the on-premises alternatives if cloud is not an option?

Attendees will gain the information they need to make better decisions as they build and deploy their own team collaboration strategy.

Two speakers will share their "Tips & Tricks" insights on implementation on an effective test automation framework in DevOps and dos and don'ts with Unified Function Testing (UFT) and Lean Functional Testing (LeanFT). They will share their knowledge and expertise and provide thought-provoking and actionable content.

Shown below is an outline of the agenda and topics:

•Speaker: Bob Crews
Seven Tips to Implement an Effective Test Automation Framework in DevOps: This presentation will provide seven strategic, proven tips to more effectively design and implement a robust test automation framework in an Agile and DevOps environment. A brief overview of the critical components and characteristics of an effective framework will be presented followed by the key value and benefits, essential for justification to leadership.

•Speaker: Carsten Neise
Dos and Don'ts with Micro Focus UFT and LeanFT: Carsten will demonstrate what bottlenecks you may fall into daily from installing Micro Focus UFT up to usage. Additionally, he will show some differences in using Micro Focus LeanFT and UFT.

Join us for the next upcoming SIG Talk on Tuesday, April 17, 2018: http://www.vivit-worldwide.org/events/EventDetails.aspx?id=1083510&group=.

This presentation will provide seven strategic, proven tips to more effectively design and implement a robust test automation framework in an Agile and DevOps environment. A brief overview of the critical components and characteristics of an effective framework will be presented followed by the key value and benefits, essential for justification to leadership.

Join us for the next upcoming SIG Talk on Tuesday, April 17, 2018: http://www.vivit-worldwide.org/events/EventDetails.aspx?id=1083510&group=.

The way in which we sell is changing, especially for women in hi-tech careers. Today’s sales environment is culture-driven, and the culture in the hi-tech industry can be a challenging place for women in leadership positions.

The biggest change has been in collaborative conversation. There is no product discussion, we don’t talk about hardware, software or service. We discuss the problem or need in depth and work toward a proof of concept. Instead of selling big deals, the market has shifted towards proof of concept, subscription-based and selling to inform. It’s not just about sales anymore; it’s about sales and marketing alignment and how to bridge the gaps.

Talking points will include:
- How the market has shifted
- How women can help and enable other women
- Tips and tricks for selling in the world of digital transformation

Business pressures are driving many IT organizations toward faster release cadence, Lean, and more Agile-like development processes. Many groups have developed processes and practices that already work very effectively, without requiring significant change. But to succeed in a bimodal world, many customers are looking at multiple tools to support newer practices and Continuous Integration (CI). Micro Focus ALM customers already have access to the tools and capabilities to succeed.

Join this webinar:

To understand what’s new in the Micro Focus ALM portfolio
To see all the new capabilities that help you unlock your existing investment. To view a demonstration of the latest capabilities in the ALM platform, including the integrations between ALM and ALM Octane and the Development, Testing, and Build environments

IT Transformation projects are usually driven by the need to reduce complexity, improve agility, simplify systems, contain costs, manage ever growing data and provide more efficient operational management. Arguably, for seasoned IT professionals there is nothing new about the drivers for transformational change; it’s the velocity and scale of transformation today that’s the big challenge.

Today, to effectively accelerate business innovation, successful IT leaders are building infrastructure that focuses on automation and flexibility, supporting agile application development and helping deliver world-class customer experience. Of course, IT teams are still under pressure to deliver legacy, mission-critical applications but they also need to support a seemingly constant flow of emerging business opportunities. They’re also tasked to lower costs, reduce Capex, while helping to drive revenue growth. That’s a lot of drivers and this complex juggling act often requires modernising infrastructure. An almost inevitable result of this is that the mix of platforms they adopt will include public cloud.

So, does that signal the end of the corporate data centre as we know it? Well, as is so often the answer – yes and no. ‘Yes’ because there is no doubt that the complexity and cost of building and managing on-premise infrastructures is becoming increasingly unsustainable for many businesses. And ‘no’ because business continuity and stability of legacy applications are still, quite rightly, primary drivers today. But the corporate data centre may well now be a service provider’s data centre...

Benchmarking storage performance is both an art and a science. In this 5th installment of the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum’s “Storage Performance Benchmarking” series, our experts take on optimizing performance for various workloads. Attendees will gain an understanding of workload profiles and their characteristics for common Independent Software Vendor (ISV) applications and learn how to identify application workloads based on I/O profiles to better understand the implications on storage architectures and design patterns. This webcast will cover:
•An introduction to benchmarking storage performance of workloads
•Workload characteristics
•Common Workloads (OLTP, OLAP, VMware, etc.)
•Graph fun!

With the growth of the number of cyberattacks, having a Security Information Event Management (SIEM) Technology in place can aggregate and correlate data from security feeds. These include: network discovery and vulnerability assessment systems, risk and compliance systems, log management systems, penetration testing tools, firewalls, IPS, threat intelligence feeds, host antivirus systems, web security appliances, and email security appliances. SIEM can be a "single pane of glass" for the security analysts to monitor the enterprise.

SIEM Technology also allows companies to be able to correlate data from various sources to surface patterns that could represent malicious or suspicious activity. This way, they can prevent, block, or contain all nefarious networks activity and attacks.

Chris Trimper will show you how to leverage Splunk for storing and analyzing performance data from LoadRunner. This allows for easy trending and possible collaboration with other application metrics stored in Splunk. We will also look at building self-service dashboards showing application performance metrics.

The Data Centre Maturity Model (DCMM) was created by The Green Grid and can help assess the current and desired states of your data centre(s), highlighting areas that could be enhanced using a maturity modeling approach.

This webinar covers the complexity of data centre procurement and the possible routes to the procurement of data centres and data centre services. Running an innovation procurement process for energy efficient data centre products and services could be challenging if not equipped with all the necessary knowledge, templates, tools, etc.

This webinar covers the various legislation and policies, at a European level as well as their application in four different countries, namely: United Kingdom, Netherlands, Germany and France. Legislation and Policies have an important role to play to steer, stimulate and support new products and services but also new business models.

Listen to Sophie Legault, Director of T&D Business Unit at EXFO as she talks about the 4G to 5G transition, the implication of highly dense networks, impact on the costs of maintenance on fronthaul networks and the challenges MNOs may face. She will also delve into best practices for addressing interference and PIM in mobile networks and improving the quality of fiber-based fronthaul and CRAN deployments.

Today's Fibre Channel SANs are tasked with reliably delivering huge amounts of data with almost zero latency in an environment with a large variance of end device capabilities. Fibre Channel is a lossless network protocol but what ramifications does that have? What is considered a good SAN design and what are best practices? What situations can lead to suboptimal performance? How can a device that is not performing well affect the performance of devices even on different parts of the SAN? Can a device that is returning credits without delay affect the SAN just like a device that is returning credits slowly?

Get answers to these questions and more in this live FCIA webcast where you’ll learn:

•How Fibre Channel achieves a lossless data delivery
•The definition of "slow drain“
•Basic slow drain indications and what they mean
•“Over” Utilization - How a device that isn't "slow drain" by the typical definition can affect a SAN in a similar fashion as a slow drain device
•How to prevent, Identify, and resolve performance problems

After you watch the webcast, check-out the the FCIA Q&A blog http://bit.ly/2ouWq4b

Best practices for achieving Enterprise IT and operational efficiency.

The Enterprise Architecture channel presents the next generation of Enterprise IT: recognizing the strategic importance of digital transformation and the data center to make companies more nimble and competitive. These presentations will help demanding IT and BizOps professionals achieve flexibility, scalability and performance with reduced risk and complexity.